A never-Rails dev here using Elixir/Phoenix, easily the best choice I've made after hearing positive things here on HN.

The Elixir community may be an amalgamation of Rails folks looking for better runtime performance and cool new tech, and Erlang folks looking for syntactic sugar and a growing developer community. (I'm neither.)

Elixir's author was one of Rails core contributors, which probably also helps in bringing the Rails crowd over. One could think of Elixir as a "better" version of Rails rewritten on top of the Erlang stack, even if Rails and Elixir are apples and oranges under the hood.

See also: the inverse of OP's article, the creator of Erlang trying out Elixir (2013) [1]

[1] http://joearms.github.io/2013/05/31/a-week-with-elixir.html#...

Phoenix is heavily inspired by Rails, and I also think some of the core contributors are the same. No reason people unfamiliar with Rails can't use/learn it, but if they are previously familiar with Rails it can be easier.

As a Django dev, who has done bits of Rails, I felt it suffered from some of the same problems with Rails that cause me to prefer Django. I'd love to see what something inspired by the Django/Python community could be.